Littering — A Main Occupation of Our Species

Post author:Meredith Small
Post published:September 1, 2022
Post comments:3,788 Comments

Why Do Humans Simply Drop Everything They Don’t Want Anymore? Every two weeks I don a pair of plastic surgical gloves, grab some sort of receptacle such as a grocery bag, cardboard box, or a large used manila envelope and go outside to clean up my street. I live on a very narrow brick alley in downtown Philadelphia. Cars can get down the street, but they rarely do because it looks impossible to those who don’t live here. In other words, this tiny street is not a main thoroughfare, not…

Everybody in the World Talks the Same Way to Babies

Post author:Meredith Small
Post published:August 20, 2022
Post comments:3,369 Comments

Anthropologists Show That We Are All Suckers for Baby Talk It happens every time we meet a baby, anyone’s baby. Suddenly our brains are taken over by some other person with a different voice, one that goes up a few octaves and comes out in a sing-song lilt to produce some of the silliest sentences on earth: “Waaadda a cuuttee liddle baby! Aren’t youuuu the sweeeetest thingy in the world? Are you the sweeetest little booy in the world? Is this the cutest little girrrl ever?” And how many…

Monkey Fake News

Post author:Meredith Small
Post published:March 23, 2022
Post comments:2,050 Comments

When the Public is Fed the Wrong Information About Primates A recent article about Japanese macaque monkeys went viral, even getting exposure on Stephen Colbert, because of its provocative headline: “Love Triangle Challenges Reign of Japan’s Monkey Queen.” But that idiotic headline, based on inaccurate reporting, was simply fake news. I know this because as an anthropologist, I spent many years observing and searching about macaques and the reporter doesn’t seem to have any idea how these animals operate. When someone is educated and experienced in a profession or a…

Sex Unites Us

Post author:Meredith Small
Post published:January 4, 2022
Post comments:1,868 Comments

Our Species Has Spent Its History Mating with Anyone Close By In graduate school for anthropology many decades ago, I learned that the phylogenic tree of human evolution was best represented by a sturdy central trunk. That trunk embodied the singular path of our species but there were also several weak branches sprouting off the truck that had withered and died. The roots of that central trunk were the first bipedal hominids, Australopithecines living about 4.5 million years ago, and the top canopy was Homo sapiens sapiens, modern humans. But…

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